The City of Fort Collins will receive $18.1 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop a smart-grid energy management system. The funding is made available to 100 companies nationwide through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.[2]

The City of Fort Collins’ Front Range Smart Grid Development project involves the municipal utilities for the cities of Fort Collins and Fountain, Colorado. The project includes citywide deployment of advanced metering infrastructure (AMI); expansion of distribution automation capabilities including supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system connected fault indicators; SCADA-connected remote operated feeder switches; integration with the outage management system; demand response products; evaluation and potential implementation of time-based rate programs; customer education; and Web portal access. Information from this project facilitates: (1) customer-participants’ ability to view their energy consumption through in-home displays, a Web portal, or both; and (2) the ability of City of Fort Collins and the City of Fountain to manage, measure, and verify targeted demand reductions during peak periods. The new AMI and distribution automation technologies help improve service quality and reliability by enabling more efficient outage management, distribution circuit monitoring, and remote circuit switching.[3]